Probation Periods: 3 or 6 months… or something in between?
With upcoming changes to unfair dismissal protections, we’re getting one question a lot: Should probation periods be 3 months or 6?
As always… It’s not that simple.
What’s changing
The Employment Rights Act is reducing the unfair dismissal protection from 2 years’ service down to 6 months.
This comes into effect from 1st January 2027 and applies retrospectively. So if someone is employed on or before 1st July 2026 and is still with you in January 2027, they will have unfair dismissal protection.
What’s the impact
In short: your margin for assessing whether you’ve got the right person in the right role shrinks.
“We just don’t think they’re the right fit” won’t cut it after 6 months without a proper process and justifiable reasoning behind it.
So the focus shifts upstream. For our clients, we’re:
Reviewing recruitment: Are you attracting the right people in the first place?
Strengthening interviews: Are you properly testing capability and setting expectations?
Tightening processes: Because you can exit someone after 6 months, but only if you follow the right process and DOCUMENT EVERYTHING
Training managers: They’re making the day-to-day decisions, so they need the confidence and capability to get it right
And then there’s the big one…
Probation periods
There’s a lot of noise around whether probation periods should now be 3 months or not. Our take? It depends on the business and roles.
A blanket approach rarely works. What matters is whether your probation period is actually doing its job… helping you to assess if that person can successfully carry out that role.
Questions to ask
Before deciding on length, we’d be asking:
How realistic is it to assess someone in that timeframe? Maybe a 90-day journey is enough for you to make a confident call… maybe not.
What are you actually measuring? If you don’t have clear objectives and expectations, the length of probation is irrelevant
How often are you checking in? Regular reviews are what make probation effective. Waiting until the end of month 3 or 6 to have a “final” conversation is where it goes wrong.
Our key takeaways
Probation periods need to work for your business, not follow a trend
Consistency is critical – across managers, teams and decisions
Early intervention matters – give people time to improve
Get a Guru’s opinion
Getting this right isn’t always straightforward. We work with businesses to design probation processes that actually work in practice, not just on paper. That means asking the right questions, tailoring the approach and making sure managers can deliver it confidently.
If you want to sense check your approach, get in touch.